Maserati tagged posts

As you may have already known, lots of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles company news come out today. While most of them promises “new models” comes out at xxxx year. Here are some of the information (plus a little bit insider news) I consider being important.

1. New Town and Country minivan launched at 2016. The new T&C will have 3 seats for the second row (the center one can be removed; also stow and go is available too), makes the minivan an 8-person vehicle; Also a hybrid version will join the lineup, making it the first hybrid car in this segment;

2. New model: Chrylser 100,  both 1.4L turbo and 2...

We all know race engines means high tech and expensive. Because these engines are only produced in small volume and usually working in high load/high stress circumstances, they usually uses some technologies that are not available in massively produced passenger cars.

One interesting fact is, because the race engine has higher assembly precision standards, there is less energy loss due to frictions between internal moving parts. Therefore, some race engines do have better fuel efficiency when comparing to a similar massively produced passenger car engine.

But some good stuff in race engines may act reversely in cars that are designed for daily driving...

Note: we have moved the complete list to our new site, all future updates will be published there.

The torsional rigidity is a critical parameter for a vehicle, which measures how many force you need to apply to “twist” the car body frame by one degree. Of course the larger of this value, the better.

From the consumer’s perspective, what is the benefit of a high torsional rigidity car body? A vehicle with high torsion rigidity will give the driver and passenger a more “solid” feel when the car is running, especially when the road is bumpy and has lots of potholes on it...

Nowadays, cars usually have their engine bolted to transmission together directly, because it is easy to implement and saves costs. For some sports cars which seek to have a better weight distribution, the engine and transmission are located in different section of the car body, therefore requires an extra solid torque tube to connect them. This is an exotic design, for example, the below image shows the LFA’s torque tube.

But please do not misunderstand that this is a requirement for a good sports car...